I was talking in terms of day, not seasonally.

Well, seasonal is the much bigger challenge anyway. Like... say our entire fleet of vehicles has been transitioned to electric, then we could maybe find smart grid solutions which use the car batteries to store the surplus energy produced by solar panels during the day and use it to meet demand at night.

But that's not a solution to the problem of how to handle two weeks of consecutive cloudy winter days when both solar and wind are producing at 5% or so of installed capacity.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Nov 6 2021 04:35pm

That's easier than you think. The thing about nuclear is it doesn't ramp effectively. We only need something to bridge the gap between the start of the storm and the nuclear plant ramping up, which is like 8-12 hours. Then it can sit at higher capacity for two weeks until clouds disappate.

It still means that you would need nuclear power plants available with enough capacity to provide energy for the entire economy/society. That would require building hundreds of new nuclear power plants, which on average take something like 15 years to complete. Also, if we have the infrastructure in place to run the entire country on nuclear anyway, why not just do that?

Nuclear can't be the sole driver of power because it is difficult to ramp. It gives a constant supply, but takes a long time to increase or decrease the supply.

So cases where the base load is increased, like during a winter storm, is actually easy to handle as long as you have something to handle the ~8 hours while the plant ramps up. The thing it can't do is the regular ramping up and down from the business day.

Well, if the climate activists are to be believed, we don't have the 15 years until all the necessary nuclear power plants would be online. An even bigger problem is that such a massive extension of nuclear power (which ofc cant be limited to the US, it would have to take place globally) would exhaust the global uranium reserves within a few decades. Even if we wanted, we do not have the necessary fuel to run this scheme for too long. So the clock for finding a solution for the storage problem with renewables would still be ticking. At the end of the day, your proposal would be a big bet on a technological breakthrough bailing humanity out.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Nov 6 2021 04:57pm

I don't think it would deplete global uranium reserves. We have an absolute shit load of uranium still available to mine. It's god damn everywhere. Maybe it would deplete our reserves, but we can pretty easily enrich more.

Indeed it would take a while to get them all operational. Which is why we should have started a long time ago.

Honestly, at this point, we're beyond the point of no return. Anything short of a WW2 style deployment of manufacturing tech to make solar panels and such and do carbon capture isn't enough. We didn't act in time and we're going to get the worst of it no matter what we do.

This post was edited by NetflixAdaptationWidow on Nov 6 2021 05:00pm

you cant store enough electric energy for that, there are nowhere near enough capacities to store the energy chemically even if every square foot is covered with solar and wind mills

and we are only talking about replacing our current supply, which will increase massively in the future

full renewable is possible in low energy and low tech agricultural country with zero industry and pre industrialisation living standard



germany, so literally the country that pushes renewables the hardest and already invested hundreds of billions

My friend has permanent brain damage and has trouble retaining knowledge in academic settings. Working with his hands comes much easier to him and learning hands on is much easier to him.

As I said before, I'm more than happy to have coal miners sent to Africa to mine diamonds. They might actually be useful there. For those who don't possess any economically workable talent, they can just leach off the system and have a minimum standard of living.

I have to ask, do you not believe in climate change? I don't consider myself an alarmist, but it seems prudent to make investments now so we don't have to deal with harsher consequences in the future. I take the same approach with China and many other long term threats.

Unfortunately that ship's probably sailed already.